Aron Smetana

2019-04-25T14:38:00.001-07:00

Report: 26 States Now Ban or Restrict Community Broadband

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kzmana/report-26-states-now-ban-or-restrict-community-broadband

Six Mojave Features You Probably Don’t Use, But Should

2018-12-10T14:58:00.001-08:00

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/owc/~3/SQn7gyBiaD0/46828-six-mojave-features-you-probably-dont-use-but-should

2018-09-13T17:03:00.000-07:00

https://www.curbed.com/platform/amp/2018/9/13/17855466/best-rv-travel-trailer-for-sale-lightweight-camper-new-buy

What’s the best password manager for macOS and iOS?

2018-07-01T07:58:00.001-07:00

9to5Mac What's the best password manager for macOS and iOS?

Password management is something that you often hear a lot about in today's news. Apple has begun supporting various flavors of password managers through APIs while also offering a fairly decent password manager built right into Safari.

You might be wondering – what is the best place to store your passwords and other information you want to keep secure? There are number of third-party options such as 1Password, LastPass, and Dashlane. As I looked at Apple's offerings and all of the alternatives, here is how I judged them:

Syncing capabilities
Multi-platform support
Overall user experience
Pricing and plans

Safari's Password Manager

The first option that most Apple users will see is the Password Manager built right into Safari. While I don't think it's nearly as robust as some of the third party alternatives, it's brought a lot of good to iOS and Mac users.

When you go to create an account on a website, Safari (iOS or macOS) will suggest a very strong password and then offer to remember it. It will then sync that information over iCloud Keychain to all your other devices. This feature helps keep users from reusing the same password over and over again.

If simple password creation is all you need, then Safari's password manager might be enough. It checks most of the boxes: it syncs to all your devices, it works on iOS and macOS, and is built right into Safari (so it's free).

My main concern is that the overall user experience isn't near as good as some of the alternatives. The only way to access your passwords is by going to Safari > Preferences > Passwords. One thing Safari also lacks is 2-factor authentication support. All of the third-party apps I reviewed offer the ability to generate one-time use passwords right inside the app. This means that you don't need to use an app like Google Authenticator to generate the temporary passwords.

LastPass

The first third-party app I considered is LastPass. LastPass is owned by the same company who owns LogMeIn, so it's certainly no fly by night company. LastPass offers free and paid plans. I've tried LastPass off and on over the years.

They offer syncing to all of their clients (Chromebooks, iOS, Mac, Windows, Android, etc). Their pricing is very fair. Single users are $2 per month (billed annually) while families are charged $6 per month (billed annually). They also offer teams and enterprise accounts as well (with features such as SAML single sign-on, LDAP support, API access, etc).

While it's not a bad choice, it just never could wrap my head around the user interface. Of all the apps I've looked at it, I liked its UI the least. It's gotten better in recent years, but I still prefer some other solutions on the market.

I'd say it's the most "enterprisey" of all the solutions – meaning that it's something I could see a CIO rolling out company-wide.

Dashlane

Another app I looked at was Dashlane. While a lot of these apps offer very similar features (password autofill in your browser, etc), Dashlane offers something unique: Password Changer.

Password Changer™ is a free feature in Dashlane. It does the heavy-lifting of replacing old passwords with strong new ones, and secures them in Dashlane where they're remembered and typed for you.

It works on a number of websites. This feature would come in handy when password breaches are reported. Dashlane's UI is very clean. Pricing wise – they are very competitive. They offer a free plan that works on a single device. Paid plans are $40 per year, and it unlocks syncing to all your devices (iOS, macOS, Windows, ChromeOS, etc.). They don't seem to offer a family plan, though.

1Password

There are sometimes apps that feel at home to you, and 1Password is that one for me. I've used it for years, and despite some excellent offerings from competitors, 1Password is an app I always come back to using. Of all the apps I tried, 1Password feel the most native to the Apple ecosystem.

Although they started as an Apple-only company, they have since branched out to Android, Windows, and Chrome OS. They offer a standalone app purchase as well as a subscription plan. The standalone app is sold for $65 for the desktop. If you want to unlock Pro features on iOS, it requires a $9.99 in-app purchase. Syncing for the standalone apps can be done using Dropbox or iCloud.

The subscription plan is what I use, though. My wife and I use 1Password so much that we chose the family plan. It's only $60 per year, and it will expand to cover my kids when they are old enough (covers up to five people). We have a shared "vault" where we can keep passwords that we both need access to (bank logins, etc.). They also offer Team and Business plans as well. With the subscription plans, you don't have to worry about purchasing any features. Everything is unlocked with a subscription.

Outside of just password management, there are many features that 1Password supports that make it something worth paying for (vs. Safari's free features). They include support for secure notes with attachments, personal information such as social security numbers, app license information, credit card information, passport information, and more. It's not just a password manager. It's an app that I use to manage anything I have that I need access to, but want the utmost security to go along with it. Everything is securely stored with end to end encryption, and I can unlock the information using Face ID (or Touch ID). I can access my data from all my devices but in a secure manner using 1Passwords syncing service.

1Password is built with modern, open source libraries and industry-proven solutions. So you get lightning-fast performance, a technology stack you can trust, and top-notch reliability.

1Password runs on Amazon Web Services, the largest and most secure infrastructure provider on the planet. Alongside great scalability and high availability, AWS also enables us to use KMS Hardware Encryption to further harden your SRP Verifier.

One of the features I mentioned earlier was support for two-factor authentication. This feature allows me to generate one-time use passwords for websites like Google and Twitter. 1Password even puts the one time use passcode on my clipboard after it autofills so I don't have to spend time copying and pasting into websites.

Another way 1Password is making your life easier is WatchTower.

Watchtower will automatically notify you if there's been a security breach for a website you use. A bright red bar that's pretty darn hard to miss will display across the top of the item, prompting you to change the password for that site.

WatchTower will also check your passwords against haveibeenpwned.com to see if they are on a known leaked password list.

Overall, 1Password is just a fantastic app/service. It feels like the most native app to the Apple ecosystem. It has a fair pricing model and has continued to receive updates to take advantage of whatever new features Apple has offered with new versions of iOS and macOS. Other apps like Dashlane and LastPass are great, but 1Password provides, in my opinion, an overall better experience. Safari's Password Manager is an excellent feature for something built into iOS and macOS, but 1Password is worth every penny. It integrates with all the major browsers for ease of use.

What do you think? Do you think Safari offers enough features to avoid paying for one of these apps?

https://9to5mac.com/2018/07/01/best-password-manager-mac-ios/

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How to Archive Mac, iOS Notes by Exporting Them as PDFs

2018-06-29T07:55:00.001-07:00

Other World Computing Blog How to Archive Mac, iOS Notes by Exporting Them as PDFs

Many Apple fans love the Notes app in macOS and iOS. It's easy to use, it's surprisingly powerful, and since it is cross-platform, a note saved to iCloud on one device shows up on all devices logged into the same Apple ID. There may come a time when you want to archive a note that you've created, and a great way to do that is to export the note as an Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) file. That file takes on all of the characteristics and formatting of the original note, and it can be viewed on any computer platform. Here's how to archive your notes in Notes on both macOS and iOS.

macOS

1) Launch Notes on your Mac

2) Select the Note that you wish to archive as a PDF file

3) Select File > Export as PDF from the menu bar

4) In the Save As dialog that appears, you can type in a name for the PDF file or retain the existing Note title (see screenshot below)

(When exporting a Note as a PDF file, you can change the file name to something other than the Note title.)

5) The file is saved as a PDF, and all original formatting is retained. Images that were pasted into the note expand to fill a full "page" of the PDF document, meaning that they're usually more readable than the original note (see PDF screenshot below):

(All formatting is retained in the PDF, but images pasted into a note will expand to fill a PDF page.)

Using Export to PDF produces a similar result to using Print and selecting to Print as PDF, but is faster.

iOS

Since iOS 11, it's possible to export notes on your iPhone or iPad to PDF files easily. That's great for folks who may own an iOS device, but aren't Mac users.

1) Launch the Notes app

2) Select the note you wish to turn export as a PDF file

3) Tap the Share button in the upper right corner of the iPhone or iPad screen (see image below)

(Tap the Share button to see the Create PDF button.)

4) In the share sheet that appears, scroll the bottom "line" of button to get to the Create PDF button (outlined in red in the image below), then tap it.

(Tap the Create PDF button.)

Unlike macOS, iOS does not immediately ask you for a file name. Instead, the PDF file is created and displayed on your iOS device screen. To save the file, tap "Done" above the upper right corner of the PDF, and the options to "Save File To…" or "Delete PDF" appear (see screenshot below):

(Tapping "Done" on the PDF displays this dialog.)

5) To save the PDF file, tap the "Save File To…" button, and the following dialog appears (see screenshot below):

(iOS allows you to save a PDF to compatible apps on the device or to cloud services.)

Tapping on iCloud Drive allows you to select the exact folder into which the PDF is saved. Other compatible apps and cloud services also appear on this screen.

Now that you know how to archive old notes as PDF files, perhaps it's time to clean up some of those notes that no longer have much value but you just didn't want to delete.

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Best network monitoring tools of 2018

2018-06-19T06:21:00.001-07:00

Techradar - All the latest technology news Best network monitoring tools of 2018

Although the headline-grabbing aspects of IT security usually involve cyber-wars, digital espionage and ferocious malware attacks, there is always less glamorous work taking place behind the scenes to keep company data and users safe.

And much of this involves network monitoring. The IT administrators and software developers who ensure systems stay updated, behavior across IT infrastructure is carefully examined, and outages are kept to a minimum may not grab the cyber-security limelight like those specialising in antivirus and similar areas, but their work is fundamental to the running of organizations both big and small.

Thankfully, there are a host of services that make their job a whole lot easier and more efficient, and we've run through the very best of them so you can find the perfect network monitoring tools for your organization.

We've also highlighted the best routers for small businesses

Spiceworks

Who said network security software couldn't get a little spicy? The first platform on our red-hot run-down is Spiceworks, which promises to keep you fully up to date on "the network happenings you care about most."

Among Spiceworks' features are an IP lookup tool to trace and identify unknown IP addresses in the network, a subnet calculator for creating new subnets and converting CIDR (classless inter-domain routing) notation to an IP range, a traceroute tool for troubleshooting connection issues, and an interactive outage heatmap.

Looking at potential drawbacks, it's been commented that older plugins may no longer work with newer versions of the software, while the handy connectivity dashboard feature is not currently available for new Spiceworks users at the time of writing.

However, for an easy-to-use, completely free application that makes money through ads rather than your organization's subscription, it's hard to get too hung up the negative aspects here.

You can sign up for Spiceworks here

WebTitan

WebTitan supplies businesses of all sizes with a suite of security and monitoring platforms that give a wide range of powers to IT administrators.

Doing the job of 'Big Brother' is WebTitan Cloud, a filtering solution for organizations to monitor, control and protect their online users from web content. The platform's policy engine enables admins to block access to certain web pages among certain users, while adjusting the policy for other departments in the organization.

It also includes a reporting section which covers behavior-based analysis, trend reports, security reports, and more. These reports can even be scheduled, sending the insights directly to the team members who need them.

Away from the cloud-based platform, WebTitan packages also offer DNS-based web filters that block malware, phishing attempts and ransomware. The software's creators, TitanHQ, claims its filters identify 60,000 malware variants every day and says the platform is well suited to educational institutions and wifi providers, as well as businesses.

To get a quote for a WebTitan package for your organization, follow the link below.

You can sign up for WebTitan here

Pulseway

Pulseway helps system administrators and IT departments stay right across their organization's network by offering a real-time overview of all the machines under operation. It works for Windows, Linux and Mac devices and can be used on mobile devices for full administrative control form the palm of your hand.

On top of its main dashboard for remote desktop control, patch management, white labelling and advanced automation, Pulseway offers: a business management integration that includes functions for ticketing, project management, accounting, CRM, time-tracking, invoicing, billing and help desk support; an antivirus integration powered by Webroot and Kaspersky for end-to-end protection; and a storage integration for business continuity and disaster recovery in the event of lost data and outages. Other third-party tie-ins include Slack, Pagerduty, Zendesk and IT Glue.

Personal use of Pulseway (across two devices) is free, while subscriptions for larger teams vary depending on the number of machines and whether the platform is used as on premise or as an SaaS (software as a service). Full pricing details can be found via the link below.

You can sign up for Pulseway here

Atera

Atera combines remote monitoring and management (RMM) with professional services automation (PSA) in a business management platform that's made and operated in the cloud. The creators claim its cloud DNA and scalable SaaS packages make it extra fast for onboarding and rolling out in new organizations.

The Atera platform offers IT administrators a range of features to stay on top of their network. These include remote access of computers, desktops, servers, apps and files, real time alerts on events like user log-ins, software updates, VMware and IP monitoring, IT automation and patch management, and analytics tools to dig into data and records. For those looking to expand the remit of the platform, integrations include CRM and service desk tools.

Simplicity and ease-of use is the name of the game here, but for those well acquainted with platforms of this nature who really want to push their monitoring software to its limit, the range of features with Atera may feel somewhat limited. But with flexible pricing options available, IT administrators may be able to find the package that suits the needs of their organization.

Pricing starts at $79 (£60) per user, per month.

You can sign up for Atera here

Netwrix Auditor

Netwrix Auditor is all about giving maximum visibility of IT infrastructure changes, data access and system configurations to the IT administrators of your organization. Another key component is Netwrix's security analytics technology, which monitors your IT environment and enables you to detect threats or anomalous user behaviour.

Among the platform's features is the option to automate auditing and reporting tasks to save time manually poring over logs of data, plus the ability to maintain a complete audit trail that can be archived for more than ten years. By maintaining such evidence, Netwrix Auditor enables users to prove their business adheres to and is compliant with PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOX, and FERPA standards, among others.

Potentially relieving concerns about integration, Netwrix supports auditing on a wide selection of IT systems, including Active Directory, Office 365, Windows file servers, Oracle DB and VMware. Unlike some of the other services we've seen, Netwrix doesn't support mobile use so it may not be the platform for you if you're reliant on quick check-ups on the move via phone or tablet.

You can get a quote on a Netwrix subscription via the link below.

You can sign up for Netwrix Auditor here

Best of the rest

Auvik is made exclusively for managed service providers (MSP). Based in the cloud, it enables remote monitoring and management, provides insight into client networks, and automates time-consuming tasks like device configuration and backing up data.

Like any good dog, Datadog is good at retrieving things. In this case, information about your systems, clusters and infrastructure – no matter how disparate it is – and bringing it all into one site to help you analyze and secure the data of your organization.

Panopta is all about meticulous scrutiny of your network to identify outages as quick as possible. Via 24 monitoring locations across North and South America, Europa and Asia, Panopta ensures all outages are detected no matter the duration, so your team can act fast.

Working in a similar vein, Paessler monitors your IT infrastructure to identify problems "before users even notice," it claims. A whole range of network components are covered by its monitoring systems, including LANs, WANs, servers, websites and applications.

Another strong player in this field is OpsGenie. This operations management service is based in the cloud and its alert notifications extend to mobile as well as desktop, so you can receive network updates via email, SMS and voice calls no matter where you are.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techradar/allnews/~3/tKgXX-pup-Y/best-network-monitoring-tool

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Can’t Do the 7-Minute Workout? Neither Can I

2018-06-06T16:29:00.001-07:00

I like it, and some tips if some of the routines don't work for you.
NYT > Home Page Can't Do the 7-Minute Workout? Neither Can I

Some of the exercises in the popular workout are too difficult for athletes of a certain age or body type. Here's how to make it work for you.

Credit

It's been four years since researchers from the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute in Orlando first published a series of 12 exercises that became a fitness craze known as the 7-Minute Workout.

After the workout was first reported in The New York Times, dozens of 7-Minute Workout apps and videos were created to help us learn the exercises. Everyone was doing it. Everybody, it seemed, except me.

Even though the 7-Minute Workout sounds easy, the well-kept secret about the routine is that it can be really, really hard for some of us to complete. Recently, while attending a fitness seminar that included the workout, I saw several people struggling with many of the exercises. Triceps dip? Push-ups? Wall sit? For those of us with aging knees and elbows, overweight bodies or just the extra jiggle that comes with age, even the most basic jumping jack can be a challenge.

Chris Jordan, the co-author of the original 7-Minute Workout published in the American College of Sports Medicine's Health and Fitness Journal, is here to help. The 7-Minute Workout, he says, is not limited to the 12 original exercises. So if you can't do one of them — say a standard push-up — you can always find an easier substitute that challenges the same group of muscles — like a kneeling or wall push-up.

"The workout published in The American College of Sports Medicine was a sample workout," says Dr. Jordan, who is the director of exercise physiology at the Human Performance Institute.

Indeed, on the J&J Official 7-Minute Workout app, Dr. Jordan and colleagues have created 22 variations on the workout, ranging from the "First Timer" (designed with Dr. Jordan's 82-year-old mother in mind) all the way to the advanced "Superhero Workout" (just right for Dr. Jordan's older brother, a triathlete.)

To modify the 7-Minute Workout to fit your own body's strengths and limits, it helps to understand the thinking behind the workout. The goal is to exercise four parts of the body — cardio, lower body, upper body and core — in that order, as hard as you can, for just 30 seconds, followed by five seconds of rest. The workout is designed to give you the maximum health benefit in the shortest possible time. In a seven minute workout, each of the four muscle groups gets to work out three times. The key is to stick to the sequence — cardio, lower body, upper body and core — so that each muscle group has nearly two minutes to rest before being challenged again.

"The sequence is deliberate — I can give my 100 percent best effort on that exercise with fresh muscles," says Dr. Jordan. "Knowing the following exercise is a reprieve and not the same muscle group is incredibly simple but incredibly important."

To build your own modified 7-Minute Workout for a beginner, choose an exercise from each muscle group below that you can do successfully using proper form, without pain. If you need to, you also can adjust the rest interval. Instead of five seconds between exercises, try 10 seconds and make it an eight minute workout, or rest 15 seconds and make it a nine minute workout.

Once you've picked your cardio, lower body, upper body and core exercises, repeat the sequence of exercise and rest three times. If you want variety, you can choose different exercises for round two and three — just make sure you stick with the correct order.

Here's one example. March in place for your cardio work, then do a lunge for your lower body, followed by a wall push-up for the arms and a kneeling plank for your core. Repeat two more times. If you get bored with one of the exercises, feel free to substitute another movement for the same muscle group — add standing box or jumping jacks instead of marching in place. Or do a chair push-up instead of a kneeling push-up.

And even if you pick the easiest exercise for you, the key is to push yourself hard for 30 seconds, so that you get the full benefit. It should be challenging, but not painful.

"Seven minutes is only good if it's a hard seven minutes," says Dr. Jordan. "Stay within your discomfort zone. Don't go into the pain zone."

Sample Exercises

Cardio: jumping jacks, high knees (on your toes), jump rope, march in place, stand and box

Image

Credit

Lower Body: chair-assist split squat, chair-assist squat (holding on to the back of a chair as you move up and down from a near-sitting position), lunge, side lunge, wall sit

Credit

Upper Body: kneeling push-up, push-up, triceps dip, chair-assisted push-up, wall push-up

Credit

Core: abdominal crunch, kneeling side plank, plank, Superman, kneeling plank

Credit

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/05/well/move/05EASIER-7MINUTE.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Tip: How to Pose for a Photograph

2018-06-05T16:13:00.001-07:00

NYT > Home Page Tip: How to Pose for a Photograph

Tip

CreditIllustration by Radio

"You look your most attractive when you have a strong jawline," says Peter Hurley, a portrait photographer in New York City who has taken head shots for some 30,000 people, including the likes of Mikhail Baryshnikov and Ariana Grande. To accentuate and define your jaw, elongate your body and neck by imagining you're being pulled up by a string attached to the top of your head. Once you've giraffed yourself to the best of your ability, jut your forehead and chin toward the camera.

More symmetrical faces might look good straight on, but you'll probably want to turn your head slightly to highlight a particular side. Hurley finds that most people have a more attractive "good side," which tends to correspond with where they part their hair. To find yours, shoot a series of three selfies: First look straight at the camera, nose at 12 o'clock; turn to the right, nose at 1 o'clock; then to the left, at 11 o'clock. "Everyone has a sweet spot," Hurley says.

Don't say "cheese" or open your lips unless you're genuinely laughing. "A majority of the population can't smile with their teeth and look real," Hurley says. Opt for closed lips with just the hint of a smile. A compelling portrait contains a slight narrative tension that makes the viewer want to know more. Avoid opening your eyes wide, which will make you look blank and thoughtless. Instead, raise your lower eyelid up toward your pupil, an action Hurley calls "squinch" ("squint" plus "pinch"). Men especially might consider narrowing the space between the brows, which intensifies the gaze. Sometimes Hurley tells a client to look sneaky, "a little devious even." Be cautious, though; go overboard with these techniques and you can easily end up in comically come-hither terrain. If that's not what you're going for, look directly at the camera and imagine a real person on the other side — your mom, your child, a customer. Practicing in the mirror ahead of time helps, too.

New clients often arrive at Hurley's studio listing the things they want to obscure with a pose: moles, a snaggletooth, a scar, a large nose, a double chin. Don't position yourself around your perceived flaws. Find a posture that makes you feel confident, even radiant. "We're in these bodies for life," Hurley says. "We have to figure out what we like about ourselves."

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/magazine/how-to-pose-for-a-photograph.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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5 Things you Need to Know about the Hybrid Cloud

2018-02-12T16:58:00.001-08:00

Petri IT Knowledgebase 5 Things you Need to Know about the Hybrid Cloud

55214920 – corporate customer is pressing hybrid cloud on a touch screen interface. business metaphor and information technology concept for grounding enterprise it partly in the cloud and partly on premise.

Today, a lot of businesses have begun adopting a hybrid cloud strategy for various business initiatives; there's no doubt that this is beginning to be a popular trend. According to a Gartner report, the hybrid cloud will be the way most businesses are using the cloud by 2020.

The hybrid cloud brings together on-premise and cloud resources enabling businesses to maximize the flexibility and performance they need for their IT operations while simultaneously reducing their IT costs.

The hybrid cloud actually describes a lot of different cloud usage scenarios. Technically, as soon as your business starts paying for some cloud service you are in a hybrid cloud model — no matter what the scope of that service might be; in essence, hybrid cloud simply means you're delivering IT services that use multiple hosting models where one is in the cloud. There are a lot of practical benefits for the hybrid cloud but before jumping in too deep into the hybrid cloud there are five important things you need to know.

Hybrid is not just about the cloud – The hybrid cloud is also about continuing to deliver traditional IT and legacy applications. Many businesses use on-premise infrastructure to run core business functions and then leverage the cloud for dev and test, backup, and DR, SaaS or other new applications. The hybrid cloud enables you to choose the best platform for the application. For instance, an application with periodic workload spikes may be best supported in the cloud where it won't impact your other applications while for a business critical performance-intensive application it's probably better to run it on-premise. The hybrid cloud enables the best of both worlds.
The hybrid cloud can reduce your costs and operational requirements – The cloud provides a flexible pay-as-you-go model that enables you to easily add computing and storage resources to your IT infrastructure. Taking advantage of the cloud and cloud vendor resources can reduce the need for capital expenditure because you're leasing cloud resources that you don't need to manage. Plus, there's no doubt that the hyper-scale public cloud vendors like Microsoft and Amazon are far better at managing their infrastructure at scale then your business is – even if you have excellent IT resources. Leveraging cloud resources can help enable your business to focus on business initiatives, data analysis, and new projects. Similarly, cloud storage is less expensive than traditional SAN or NAS storage and leveraging cloud storage can reduce the need for expensive local storage upgrades as a result of rapidly growing storage requirements.
Hybrid identity management is critical – The hybrid cloud requires users to authenticate to both local resources and cloud resources. Maintaining a common identity across all systems is vital to ensuring secure cloud access. The last thing you want is users writing their passwords down on yellow sticky notes. To effectively manage access and control, you must be able to provide single sign-on functionality. The ability to extend your existing corporate identity into the cloud is essential. Cloud services like Azure AD and AWS Single Sign-On allow you to extend your local AD authentication to their respective cloud services.
You need to be aware of hybrid cloud security and compliance issues – Closely related to the need for identity management, the hybrid cloud has some unique security and compliance requirements. One of these issues is storing and transferring compliant data like HIPPA or PCI DSS governed data. You'll need to ensure that data is not transferred from a local compliant database to a less secure public cloud database or vice versa. You also have to ensure that the data moving between your local infrastructure and the cloud is protected. In addition, if you are using cloud storage for your local or cloud data you need to be aware that some countries have enacted laws that require their company's data to remain within their national borders. Today's cloud providers like Azure and Amazon both have options to allow this but you need to explicitly take advantage of them.
The hybrid cloud improves your backup and disaster recovery (DR) options – One of the biggest benefits of the hybrid cloud is the additional options that it provides in the areas of backup and disaster recovery. All businesses have the need to perform offsite backup and the hybrid cloud can be a great choice for storing both local and cloud backups. Cloud storage costs less than local SAN storage. Plus it provides an offsite storage capability that can replace the need for other third party offsite storage services. The cloud can also be a cost-effective DR site; you can replicate business critical VMs to cloud ensuring that your business can rapidly recover its critical servers quickly. VM replication for DR can be near real-time — ensuring that in the event of a local failure you can fire up VM replicas in the cloud with very little downtime and data loss.

Under the right circumstances, the hybrid cloud is a great step forward for an on-premises only datacenter. The benefits are tangible and can be quickly quantified but it's imporant you develope the correct strategy for moving to the cloud on your own timeline.

The post 5 Things you Need to Know about the Hybrid Cloud appeared first on Petri.

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The coolest thing to do in each Bay Area city

2017-12-26T07:30:00.001-08:00

Bay Area News The coolest thing to do in each Bay Area city

A bucket list of Bay Area things to do

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/The-coolest-thing-to-do-in-each-Bay-Area-city-12411579.php

Best apps for new Macs 2017

2017-12-25T06:31:00.000-08:00

Best apps for new Macs 2017

https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/25/16807868/best-mac-apps-2017-apple-macbook-bear-rocket-franz

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The Guide to Getting into Nine Inch Nails - Noisey

2017-12-21T00:11:00.001-08:00

https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/qvzvzp/the-guide-to-getting-into-nine-inch-nails

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2017-11-16T01:01:00.000-08:00

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2017/11/15/ransomware-spreading-hackers-sneak-in-through-rdp/amp/

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The New iPhone X Gestures and How To Use Them

2017-11-15T15:27:00.001-08:00

Other World Computing Blog The New iPhone X Gestures and How To Use Them

For the first time in the ten years since the first iPhone hit the market, users now have a new set of gestures to master in order to control the latest phone — the iPhone X. There's no home button on the device, so Apple's engineers and designers worked up a new set of intuitive gestures. Whether you've just purchased an iPhone X or are considering one for a holiday gift to yourself, here are the gestures you'll need to know.

Waking Up The iPhone X
Like all of the iPhones since the iPhone 6s, you can pick up your iPhone X to wake it up in what's called "raise to wake". You can also just tap on the screen as you have in the past, or press the sleep/wake button on the right side of the iPhone X. What's changed is how you unlock the iPhone X. In place of a passcode or Touch ID, you just look at the screen of the iPhone X and Face ID authenticates you.

Blogger Yoni Heisler at BGR found out that Face ID actually learns to identify the user's face in those situations where you're not looking at the iPhone X face-on. The iPhone X will prompt you in a case like this to tap in your passcode, and in the future the iPhone X knows that your sideways glance is a valid way to unlock the phone and will "look" for you for Face ID authentication.

Finding Your Way Back Home
Since there's no home button, there's no longer any way to press it to go to the home screen. Instead, just swipe up from the bottom of any screen to make the home screen visible.

(Swipe gestures for Control Center (red) and Notification Center (green).

Controlling Control Center
The old gesture to view Control Center was a swipe from the bottom of the screen…which is now what makes the home screen viewable. There's a new gesture replacing that on the iPhone X. Swipe down from the upper right corner of the screen (in the area where the battery and signal strength indicators are) to the center of the screen, and Control Center appears (see the red arrow on the screenshot at right). In the current iOS 11.2 beta, there's a faint underline beneath those indicators as a reminder that the upper right corner is the starting point for the Control Center gesture.

To make Control Center disappear, just use the home screen gesture — swipe up from the bottom of the screen.

Notification Center
Notification Center is made visible on older iPhones with a swipe down from the top of the screen. On iPhone X, swipe down from the top left corner of the screen to the center of the screen (see the green arrow on the screenshot at right). A swipe up from the bottom of the screen makes Notification Center go away.

Switching Apps
To see the multitasking view showing recently-used apps in the past few versions of iOS, you double-tapped the home button from the home screen. This displayed a series of floating app "cards" that you could swipe through, then tap on to bring up another app.

With iPhone X, the new gesture is decidedly different — you swipe up from the bottom of the screen, then pause with your finger still on the screen. The multitasking view appear, and it's then possible to swipe left and right to switch between apps.

For those who have had iPhones with 3D Touch, you know that there was a gesture where you could push and hold on the left side of the screen while in an app, then pull to the right to bring the last-used app into view. On the iPhone X, the same thing can be done by using your thumb to swipe up from the bottom of the display, then in an arc to the right side of the phone.

In addition, whenever you're in an app you'll see a line (usually black or white) at the bottom. Swipe left or right on this line (see blue arrows below) to move to the previous or next app.

(Swipe left or right on the "line" at the bottom of an app to switch to other apps.)

Paying with Apple Pay
When standing in front of an Apple Pay cash register with your iPhone X in hand, just double-tap the side button (the sleep/wake button) while looking at the screen. Face ID authenticates you, and the payment is made in no time at all.

This process also works when making purchases from the App Store. Once you've decided to purchase an app, a prompt (see right side of the screenshot below) appears to remind you to double-click that button to authenticate and install.

(When purchasing apps in the App Store, you'll be asked to double-click the side button to authenticate.)

Siri
The best way to invoke Siri on an iPhone X is through "Hey, Siri". By doing this, Siri doesn't need to authenticate you and comes right back with an answer. If your iPhone X is in your hand, or it's not appropriate to use "Hey, Siri", then press on the side (sleep/wake) button to invoke Siri.

Snapping Screenshots
The previous gesture for making iPhone screenshots was to press the side button and home button at the same time. Since there's no home button on the iPhone X, you now squeeze the side and volume-up buttons simultaneously. The screenshot appears in the lower left of the screen, and tapping the screenshot thumbnail brings it into a editor for cropping and annotation.

Turn It Off
The sleep/wake button does exactly that on an iPhone X — puts the iPhone to sleep or wakes it. To totally power down the device, use the same gesture you just learned for making screenshots, except keep holding the side and volume-up buttons until you feel the iPhone give you a haptic alert indicating that Face ID has been temporarily disabled. When that happens, a look at the screen reveals three sliding buttons for turning off power, showing your medical ID or making an emergency SOS call.

By the way, if someone is trying to force you to use Face ID to authenticate and unlock your iPhone X and you don't want to do that, use the same gesture. With Face ID shut off temporarily, you'll be asked to enter your password instead…and you can refuse to do that.

Force Restarting the iPhone X
What do you do if your iPhone X is locked up and no amount of tapping or swiping seems to be working to unlock it? It's time to force a restart, which now takes a 3-step process:

1) Press and release the volume-up button

2) Press and release the volume-down button

3) Press and hold the side (sleep/wake) button

While performing step 3, the screen of the iPhone X will go black, after which the appearance of the Apple logo shows that the device is rebooting.

Don't let this article worry you if you're about to get an iPhone X. Most of the gestures are extremely easy to use and become second nature after being used a few times.

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Five Technologies That Will Rock Your World

2017-11-15T15:21:00.001-08:00

NYT > Home Page Five Technologies That Will Rock Your World

The Kitty Hawk Flyer prototype "flying car." Kitty Hawk is a start-up that wants to move commuting above congested roadways and into the air. Ian Martin

After the Russian hacking of the 2016 election, many people worry that technology has gone too far. And yet it continues to evolve rapidly.

Largely because of the success of companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon, investment in tech research continues to climb. At the same time, because of the sudden maturation of mathematical methods that can deliver what is commonly called artificial intelligence, the possibilities are expanding.

There is reason for concern, but also for optimism. The new wave of artificial intelligence will reduce jobs, but will also improve your health and products like your smartphone. Here are five areas where tech companies, large and small, will change the way we live.

Doctors using Infervision's products at Wuhan Tongji Hospital in China. By analyzing CT scans, a neural network can learn to spot lung cancer and other signs of disease and illness in medical scans. Infervision

A.I. Health Care

Over the last half decade, with help from the complex algorithms deep neural networks, computers have learned to see. Loosely based on the web of neurons in the human brain, a neural network can learn tasks by identifying patterns in vast amounts of data. By analyzing millions of bicycle photos, for instance, a neural network can learn to recognize a bicycle.

This means that services like Facebook and Google Photos can instantly recognize faces and objects in images uploaded to the internet. But artificial intelligence will also lead to a revolution in health care. Using these same techniques, machines can also learn to identify signs of disease and illness in medical scans. By analyzing millions of retinal photos, a neural network can learn to recognize early signs of diabetic blindness. By analyzing CT scans, a neural network can learn to spot lung cancer.

Such technology will improve health care in places where doctors are scarce. But eventually, it will streamline care in the developed world as well. Google is already running tests inside two hospitals in India, and the start-up Infervision has deployed similar technology in hospitals across China.

In the longer term, similar methods promise to rapidly accelerate drug discovery and so many other aspects of health care. "Everything from the nature of the food that we grow and eat to the drugs that we give ourselves to how we monitor the impact of these things is all being transformed by A.I. in deeply profound ways," said Matt Ocko, a managing partner at DCVC, a San Francisco venture capital firm that has invested heavily in this area.

Conversational Computing

Neural networks are not limited to image recognition. Far from it. These same techniques are rapidly improving coffee-table gadgets like the Amazon Echo, which can recognize spoken commands from across the room, and online services like Skype, which can instantly translate phone calls from one language to another. They may even eventually produce machines that can carry on a conversation.

Recently, said Luke Zettlemoyer, a University of Washington professor, there has been a "huge phase shift" in the area of natural language understanding — technology that understands the natural way people talk and write. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are at the forefront of this movement, which promises to fundamentally change how we interact with phones, cars, and potentially any machine. Many companies are moving down the same path, including Replika, a San Francisco start-up.

With help from machine learning, Replika offers a smartphone "chatbot" that acts as a kind of personal confidante, chatting with you in moments when no one else is around. But the hope is that these techniques will improve to where they serve you in so many other ways. What if Alexa was truly conversational, if you could have a back and forth dialogue? Right now, it is about basic questions and commands. Today, it "recognizes" words very very well. But truly "understanding" complex English sentences is beyond machines at this point. What if machines could carry on a dialogue like Hal in 2001?

Using EEG, or electroencephalography, the start-up Neurable is building a virtual reality game that can be controlled by the mind. Neurable

Mind Control

Some people argue there are even better ways of interacting with computers by using brain waves. Rather than telling a computer what you want, many companies say they believe you could just think it.

Using electroencephalography, or EEG — a longstanding means of measuring electrical brain activity from sensors placed on the head — the start-up Neurable is building a virtual reality game that can be played with the mind. EEG is limited for this kind of use, but other researchers, including at Facebook, aim to build a far more powerful systems using optical sensors. Facebook hopes that, in a few years, this technology will let people type with their minds five times faster than they can with a smartphone keyboard.

These techniques will also face physical limits, and that may bar the way to Facebook's goal. But various start-ups, including Neuralink, founded by Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, are going several steps further, hoping to read brain activity from chips implanted inside the skull. At first, they will limit this technology to people with disabilities. But ultimately, Mr. Musk and others hope to also implant chips in healthy people.

"It is implausible that this technology would go straight into healthy people," said Ed Boyden, an M.I.T. neuroscientist who is also an adviser to Neuralink. "But there is a natural trajectory where, if a medical technology proves effective, it can move into normal individuals as well."

The Flying Car

Want more science fiction in your everyday reality? As entrepreneurs like Mr. Musk work to put a chip in your head, others are working to put cars in the skies.

Even as he sets the pace in the race to autonomous cars, Larry Page, the chief executive of Alphabet and a founder of Google, is backing Kitty Hawk, a start-up that wants to move commuting into the air. And many others, including the start-up Joby Aviation, Uber and Airbus, are working on vehicles capable of flying above congested roads. These vehicles take many forms, but generally, they carry a single rider and take off like a helicopter: straight up.

At first, Kitty Hawk will sell its vehicles to hobbyists. But the company hopes it can eventually convince the general public, and regulators, that flying cars make sense. That is no easy task. After all, these cars will require a new kind of air traffic control.

Rigetti's 8-qubit superconducting quantum processor. Rigetti Computing

The Quantum Computer

Even more outlandish? It's the prospect of a quantum computer. Drawing on the seemingly magical properties of quantum physics, such a machine would be exponentially more powerful than computers of today. Think of it this way: A quantum computer could instantly crack the encryption that protects the world's most private data.

The problem is that these machines are enormously difficult to build. but progress has accelerated. Google, IBM and Intel are investing heavily in this push, as are start-ups like Rigetti Computing.

Researchers say they believe that quantum machines eventually could accelerate drug discovery, streamline financial markets, solve traffic problems and more.

"It is a completely different paradigm for processing information," said Robert Schoelkopf, who helped invent the techniques that are driving so much of quantum computing research. "So we think that known applications are just the tip of the iceberg."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/business/dealbook/five-technologies-that-will-rock-your-world.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Your Best Ways to Say ‘Sorry, I’m Out of the Office’

2017-11-06T08:31:00.001-08:00

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/smarter-living/out-of-office-away-email-messages.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

How I cured my tech fatigue by ditching feeds | TechCrunch

2017-11-03T12:43:00.001-07:00

https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/28/how-i-cured-my-tech-fatigue-by-ditching-feeds/

45 Years Ago, An Ad Campaign Made the Beetle the World's Most Popular Car | BestRide

2017-10-27T14:01:00.001-07:00

http://bestride.com/news/entertainment/volkswagen-beetle-classic-ads

iOS 11 Tips: 10 Essential iPhone And iPad Tricks

2017-10-27T11:00:00.001-07:00

http://time.com/4959574/ios-11-tips-tricks-iphone-ipad/

Apple Photos 3: Changes, new features, and improvements

2017-10-27T10:57:00.001-07:00

https://www.macworld.com/article/3228156/photography/apple-photos-3-changes-new-features-improvements.html#tk.rss_all

Return of the Devil: Exorcism's Comeback in the Catholic Church - By - March 9, 2016 - SF Weekly

2017-10-27T10:56:00.001-07:00

Who knew?!

http://www.sfweekly.com/news/return-of-the-devil-exorcisms-comeback-in-the-catholic-church/

Vivos Survival Shelters - Shelter Pricing

2017-10-27T10:55:00.001-07:00

For those who are certain they want to be alive after the zombie apocalypse.

http://www.terravivos.com/secure/applicationpricing.htm

How I Socially Engineer Myself Into High Security Facilities - Motherboard

2017-10-27T10:53:00.001-07:00

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qv34zb/how-i-socially-engineer-myself-into-high-security-facilities

The Useful Clean Up Mailbox Option Hidden in OWA

2017-10-19T06:30:00.001-07:00

Petri IT Knowledgebase The Useful Clean Up Mailbox Option Hidden in OWA

Even with Massive Mailboxes, Some Run Out

Even with 100 GB mailbox quotas, some people do run out of space and need more to keep receiving new mail. There is no way to increase an Exchange Online mailbox quota past 100 GB, so if someone like this comes calling, you can recommend them to move a pile of email into an expandable archive or empty their Deleted Items folder to free space. Later, when the panic has abated, you might consider applying a retention policy to the mailbox to keep it under some sort of control.

A New Option

Or you can tell the user to fire up OWA and select some folders for cleaning with the very useful "Clean up mailbox" feature buried in OWA. Go to Options (cogwheel), select Mail, and voilà (Figure 1)! A link to Clean up mailbox also appears under mailbox usage in the General section of options.

Figure 1: OWA Options reveals "Clean up mailbox" (image credit: Tony Redmond)

The feature appeared without warning. At least, no one from Microsoft said anything about it at the recent Ignite conference, I can find no documentation online, and it is not listed in the Office 365 Roadmap. The feature is unique to OWA and does not appear in Outlook desktop or the mobile clients. It's a mystery, albeit a nice surprise.

Cleaning Up

Before you can do anything, OWA enumerates the folders in your mailbox and calculates how much space each folder occupies, with Deleted Items and Junk Email at the top of the list. You can get a similar view with PowerShell:

[PS] C:\> Get-MailboxFolderStatistics -Identity TRedmond |  Format-Table Name, ItemsInFolder, FolderSize

The difference is that OWA excludes many of the utility folders found in user mailboxes (like the Audits folder) and only lists those that hold user data. To decide how best to free up space, you select individual folders and then look at the clean-up options proposed by OWA. For instance, in Figure 2 we see that my Inbox occupies 1.26 GB for 6,959 messages. Cleaning out messages older than 12 months will remove 3,583 items. While OWA does not tell you this, it is reasonable to assume this will reclaim at least 0.5 GB.

Figure 2: Deciding how much email to remove (image credit: Tony Redmond)

Before OWA removes anything, you must confirm that the operation should proceed (Figure 3).

Figure 3: The warning about permanent removal (image credit: Tony Redmond)

Recoverable Items

Permanent removal means that the items do not go into the Deleted Items folder. Instead, they go into the Deletions sub-folder under Recoverable Items and stay there for between 14 and 30 days, depending on the deleted items retention period configured for the mailbox. During this period, you can recover messages using the Recover Deleted Items feature available in OWA or Outlook.

Once the retention period elapses, the messages are irrecoverable because Microsoft does not take backups for Exchange Online. Given the sheer number of mailbox databases running inside Exchange Online, it is unreasonable to expect Microsoft to take traditional backups. This has always been the case and if you are uncomfortable with this situation, you can put mailboxes on hold to force Exchange to keep the data. Users will not be able to recover messages after the retention period elapses, but administrators can run content searches to find and recover items if necessary.

Alternatively, you can investigate cloud-based backups for Exchange. Before you do, read this article and review the comments in the Microsoft Technology Community.

Cleaning is Good

Even if you are not under pressure to free space in your mailbox, it is still a good idea to have a regular clean-out. Few messages need to be kept for extended periods and if items are needed for compliance purposes, they are probably on hold (or should be).

The problem with features buried deep in a list of options is that most users never find them. Who has the patience or the time to investigate every setting in OWA Options? I don't. But I was glad that I found this one.

Follow Tony on Twitter @12Knocksinna.

Want to know more about how to manage Office 365? Find what you need to know in "Office 365 for IT Pros", the most comprehensive eBook covering all aspects of Office 365. Available in PDF and EPUB formats (suitable for iBooks) or for Amazon Kindle.

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Amazon's Alexa can now recognize individual voices and users

2017-10-13T11:11:00.001-07:00

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techradar/allnews/~3/ukTTMCbNsGQ/amazons-alexa-can-now-recognize-individual-voices-and-users